A Paris court yesterday sentenced in absentia Alois Brunner - Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man and the world's highest-ranking Nazi fugitive believed still alive - to life imprisonment for sending hundreds of Jewish children to their deaths at Auschwitz.

"Life imprisonment is too good for him," said Henri Zajdenwerger, 73, who lost 14 members of his family to Brunner's SS henchmen during the war and was among dozens of protesters outside the courthouse yesterday. "But in reality he has never paid for his crimes, and he never will."

In all, Brunner, who fled to Syria after the war and is now 88 if he is still alive, is held responsible for sending some 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. Nearly 24,000 of them were deported from the notorious Drancy transit camp outside Paris, where Brunner was commandant from June 1943 to August 1944.

The former Gestapo officer was sentenced to death twice in his absence in the 1950s, but had never been charged with the specific crime addressed in yesterday's hearing - the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region.

Aged between 15 days and 18 years old, the children were packed into cattle trains and shipped off to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen death camps in August 1944, just weeks before the Allies liberated Paris. Only 61 survived.

"Alois Brunner must be considered the true organiser of the deportation of Jews from France between June 1943 and August 1944," said the investigating magistrate Hervé Stephan, who presented the case to the court. "These final arrests sprang from a desire to deport and to exterminate the very last Jewish children it was still possible to find on French soil."

The French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld, who spent nearly 15 years bringing the case to court, admitted that without a defendant the trial was largely symbolic - an effort to honour the names and the memories of victims like Celestine Ajzykowicz, 11, Jean Bender, four, and Alain Blumberg, a two-week-old baby kicked to death by an SS guard.

"This was a case where the culpability of the defendant did not have to be proven," said Mr Klarsfeld, whose own father, arrested in in Nice in 1943, was among Brunner's early victims. "But what counts here is the victims. It was important to me to have the names of these children pronounced solemnly in a French courtroom."

Syria has always denied harbouring the Austrian-born Brunner, who, before arriving in France in 1943, emptied Vienna of 43,000 Jews and Salonika of 46,000; in the last days of the Reich he managed to deport another 13,500 from Slovakia.

"We don't know anything about Brunner," a Syrian official said this week. But despite denying knowledge of his whereabouts, Damascus has consistently barred French investigators from entering the country and has several times refused entry to Mr Klarsfeld.

Brunner fled Germany only in 1954, on a fake Red Cross passport, moving first to Egypt and then to Syria where he assumed the name Georg Fischer.

In 1961 he lost an eye to a letter bomb sent to his Damascus address in the rue Georges Haddad, by the French secret service, allegedly because he was selling arms to the Algerian liberation movement.

Another letter bomb, sent this time by the Israeli secret service, blew off four fingers of his right hand in 1980. In 1985 he gave an interview, illustrated with photographs taken in the Syrian port of Lattaquie, to the German magazine Bunte, saying he had "no regrets whatsoever". He was last seen alive by reliable witnesses in 1992.

The Jewish rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Centre accused Syria of hiding the truth. "Until Damascus produces either the man or evidence of his demise, the trauma of his victims' families will not be concluded," its director for international liaison, Shimon Samuels, said.

"Brunner is anti-semitism at its most extreme," said Mr Klarsfeld, responsible for tracking down Klaus Barbie, the Lyon Gestapo chief. "What business did he have rounding up these little children? I know them in a way, I feel affection for them; I fought to get hold of their photographs. What can we give to the dead if not our loyalty?"